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		<h1>Running via the CLI</h1>

		<p>
			As well as calling an applications <a href="./controllers.html">Controllers</a>
			via the URL in a browser they can also be loaded via the command-line
			interface (CLI).
		</p>


		<ul>
			<li><a href="#what">What is the CLI?</a></li>
			<li><a href="#why">Why use this method?</a></li>
			<li><a href="#how">How does it work?</a></li>
		</ul>


		<a name="what"></a>
		<h2>What is the CLI?</h2>

		<p>
			<dfn>The command-line interface is a text-based method of
				interacting with computers.</dfn>
			For more information, check the <a
				href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command-line_interface">Wikipedia
				article</a>.
		</p>

		<a name="why"></a>

		<h2>Why run via the command-line?</h2>

		<p>There are many reasons for running CodeIgniter from the
			command-line, but they are not always obvious.</p>

		<ul>
			<li>Run your cron-jobs without needing to use wget or curl</li>
			<li>Make your cron-jobs inaccessible from being loaded in the
				URL by checking for <kbd>$this->input->is_cli_request()</kbd>
			</li>
			<li>Make interactive "tasks" that can do things like set
				permissions, prune cache folders, run backups, etc.</li>
			<li>Integrate with other applications in other languages. For
				example, a random C++ script could call one command and run code in
				your models!</li>
		</ul>

		<a name="how"></a>
		<h2>Let's try it:&nbsp; Hello World!</h2>

		<p>
			Let's create a simple controller so you can see it in action. Using
			your text editor, create a file called
			<dfn>tools.php</dfn>
			, and put the following code in it:
		</p>

		<textarea class="textarea" style="width: 100%" cols="50" rows="10">
&lt;?php
class Tools extends CI_Controller {

	public function message($to = 'World')
	{
		echo "Hello {$to}!".PHP_EOL;
	}
}
?&gt;
</textarea>

		<p>
			Then save the file to your
			<dfn>application/controllers/</dfn>
			folder.
		</p>

		<p>Now normally you would visit the your site using a URL similar
			to this:</p>

		<code>
			example.com/index.php/
			<var>tools</var>
			/
			<var>message</var>
			/
			<var>to</var>
		</code>

		<p>Instead, we are going to open Terminal in Mac/Lunix or go to
			Run > "cmd" in Windows and navigate to our CodeIgniter project.</p>

		<blockquote>
			$ cd /path/to/project;<br /> $ php index.php tools message
		</blockquote>

		<p>
			If you did it right, you should see
			<samp>Hello World!</samp>
			.
		</p>

		<blockquote>$ php index.php tools message "John Smith"</blockquote>

		<p>
			Here we are passing it a argument in the same way that URL parameters
			work. "John Smith" is passed as a argument and output is:
			<samp>Hello John Smith!</samp>
			.
		</p>

		<h2>That's it!</h2>

		<p>That, in a nutshell, is all there is to know about controllers
			on the command line. Remember that this is just a normal controller,
			so routing and _remap works fine.</p>



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